SAS Institute Delivers SAS Enterprise Miner, V3.0
SAS Institute Inc., the leader in data warehouse, data mining, and decision support solutions, has released SAS Enterprise Miner software, Version 3.0.
With a new business-rule-based architecture, SAS Institute's market-leading software for data mining now enables business users to maximize profits and minimize losses by letting them predict costs and profit associated with specific decisions. Fostering cross-departmental collaboration are the addition of Web reports and an environment that lets business decision makers and quantitative experts work on the same project simultaneously. Rounding out the second major release of Enterprise Miner software are integrated data mining and warehousing capabilities that create data mining data marts for direct input into the software and new techniques for visualizing the entire automated data-mining process.
Industry observers say strong analytics, perfected during more than two decades of successfully meeting large organizations' data analysis needs, keeps SAS Institute ahead of the pack.
In the June 1999 edition of The Forrester Report, Forrester Research Inc., analyst Stacie S. McCullough sees the Institute's market leadership continuing into the next century, even as the tools vendors, niche players, and enterprise players jockey for position. "Enterprise analytic app vendors like SAS Institute will be propelled into dominance by their support of strong system integrator partners like Ernst & Young and KPMG, which will base a new wave of business process reengineering on the apps," McCullough said. Meanwhile, she said, "Firms should buy analytic apps today from vendors like SAS Institute that deliver on immediate needs like on-line selling or sales territory management. As business needs increase, firms can add additional modules like pipeline analysis - or create custom modules on the vendor's technology platform." Henry Morris, vice president of data warehousing and information access at International Data Corporation in Framingham, Mass., also forecasts dramatic growth in data mining and identifies SAS Institute as the leader. "According to our research, SAS Institute is the leading vendor of statistical and data mining software," Morris said. "We project the data mining market to grow at a compound growth rate of 47 percent per year over the next five years. The next wave of analytic applications will employ predictive modeling towards the goal of optimizing and personalizing each customer interaction."
The SAS Solution for CRM, a mix of products and services for creating loyal, profitable customer relationships, relies upon analyzing tremendous volumes of customer data from many sources and making the results available in an actionable form throughout the business. Enterprise Miner software's role in the solution is to profile, segment, and build predictive models from customer data to fuel target marketing, campaign management, call-center management, sales automation and other CRM activities.
"We selected SAS Enterprise Miner because we found that it had an intuitive interface and analytical depth for model development using a variety of statistical techniques," said Robert Klein, manager of the Model Development Group at Sprint's Database Marketing Dept. in Kansas City, Missouri. "We've been impressed with both Enterprise Miner's variable selection capabilities and its set of powerful model development tools. We eagerly anticipate the next release - in particular the new functionality for enhanced target marketing."
The Target Profiler, a new facility within SAS Enterprise Miner, provides a key element in the SAS Solution for CRM by giving corporate decision makers an advanced picture of costs associated with the many day-to-day choices they make. For example, a marketing manager can now weigh the fiscal impact of mailing catalogs to prospective buyers versus taking a different tack.
Other major enhancements include an enhanced interface that allows multiple users to work on the same project simultaneously, integration with SAS/Warehouse Administrator software, and a feature called Reporter Node, which assembles data-mining results into HTML reports that can be viewed with any Web browser. (See SAS Enterprise Miner 3.0 Backgrounder for more information on enhancements.)
Enhancements to Enterprise Miner software, underway for the past year, build upon SAS Institute's acclaimed methodology for automating the entire data-mining process. SEMMA, which refers to the methodology of sampling, exploring, modifying, modeling, and assessing large quantities of data, is accomplished within SAS Enterprise Miner via a single simple GUI.
"Consistent with SAS Institute's business model of responding to customers, the top new enhancements in SAS Enterprise Miner were the direct result of customer input," said Mark Brown, SAS Institute's program manager for data mining. "We're helping our customers do everything possible to develop mutually beneficial relations with their customers."
SAS Institute's data-mining expertise is supported by more than two decades as a recognized leader in data-analysis R&D. SAS Institute consultants offer an integrated data-mining solution that builds on an end-to-end data-warehouse infrastructure. Consultants apply a complete data-mining project methodology centered on the business problem, available data and appropriate analytic methods, then they apply the results.
This top-shelf consulting is an integral part of the complete data-mining solution SAS Institute is providing BB&T Corp., a multi-bank holding company based in Winston-Salem, N.C., with approximately $38 billion in assets. BB&T recently licensed Enterprise Miner software and services to identify business opportunities in its vast corporate data stores. "SAS Institute's wealth of data-mining experience augments the work our business analysts are doing with statistical modeling," said Phil Bray, BB&T's senior vice president of client insight and decision support. "We consider SAS Institute part of our group."
Now available, Enterprise Miner, Version 3.0 is a client/server solution. Client platforms include Windows95 and WindowsNT. Server platforms: Windows NT, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and Digital Compaq UNIX platforms.
SAS Institute, one of the top 10 independent software vendors, is the leader in decision support and data warehousing, providing integrated enterprise information-delivery solutions. The Institute markets packaged business solutions for vertical industry and departmental applications, as well as an integrated suite of software tools and consulting services, that allow companies to transform the wide variety of data within their organizations into information that business users and researchers need to make better decisions. SAS software and services are used at more than 33,000 business, government, and university sites in 115 countries. Founded in 1976, SAS Institute is the world's largest privately held software company, with 1998 revenue of $871 million.
Please visit SAS Institute's Web site: http://www.sas.com.